Mars Plus

by Frederik Pohl, Thomas T. Thomas

  “Why did you run like that?” he asked.

  “You, Ellen, that doctor! All of you would have killed me, just like Jory, after you found out—”

  “Jory isn’t dead.”

  “He sure looked that way.”

  “No, just deeply unconscious. We needed to get something from his brain, and to do that we had to remove certain appliances—”

  “Just like you want to remove them from me.”

  “No, Demeter. We don’t want to hurt—”

  “Ellen does! I could see it in her eyes. She hates me now.” Demeter was looking wildly around, blink into his eyes, flick down at his chin, wink past his ear, slide up the ramp, like an animal in a trap.

  “I swear it isn’t so,” he said and tried to mean it.

  “I’m not going back to that room with you.”

  “Then where—?”

  “Let me go to my hotel. I’ll stay right there, locked in if you like, until the next transport leaves for Earth. I won’t talk to anyone about anything. I just want to go home.” But the crazy shifting around with her eyes went on, flick up the ramp, blink down into the tunnel, like a broken machine on an endless do-loop.

  “Demeter…” He tried to get her attention. “It’s a little late for—”

  A pair of hands grabbed Lole’s shoulders from behind.

  “—tha-ay-ay-at.…” His voice bounced from his chest up to his soft palate as he was pulled bodily away from her, lifted off the tunnel floor, and shaken like a rag. His jaw rattled so that his teeth clicked together and were in danger of cutting his tongue.

  Some inborn conditioning saved Lole. Instead of twisting and fighting—and probably dying in the effort—he instead went limp. Dangling with his toes some centimeters off the ground, Mitsuno was held up by two bands of steel that circled his arms. Under his own weight, these bands were beginning to stretch the skin beneath the fabric of his jacket sleeves and gouge into his biceps. In this free moment for reflection, he glanced down at them and saw human-shaped fingers in what looked like tight-fitting black rubber gloves.

  Demeter slid away from the wall and walked around Lole, staring up at him with sober intensity—now that she was no longer the trapped animal.

  “Don’t hurt him, Colonel.”

  Colonel? Torraway? Why was he inside the complex now? And how did Demeter suddenly know…oh, through the grid. Of course.

  “You can put me down, sir,” Lole said quietly. “I won’t bother anyone.”

  Without a word, the hands lowered Mitsuno smoothly until his feet were flat on the floor and his legs were taking his full weight.

  Lole turned to confirm his guess. The Cyborg was bigger than he remembered, more than two meters tall and broad in proportion, with those batlike wings of solar filament quivering above his clean-shaven skull. The faceted eyes regarded him dispassionately.

  “Well, Demeter—” Lole shifted his attention to her. “What happens now? Do we both escort you to your hotel?”

  “You both will come with me,” Colonel Roger Torraway said in a flat, machined voice. It was unaltered by the helium content of the tunnel’s atmosphere, but he was pitching it high in an obvious attempt to put them at ease. “I know of a…a safe place.”

  Lole glanced at Demeter. Her face registered dismay bordering on shock. Evidently this wasn’t in her script.

  “Where?” Lole asked, curious.

  “A safe place,” the Cyborg repeated.

  “I think we can find our own way, Colonel,” Mitsuno said suavely.

  “Thank you, Colonel,” Demeter said, inching toward Lole’s side. “But I think I want to go to my hotel room now. I appreciate your—”

  “You both will come with me to a safe place.”

  Demeter was now standing practically under his arm, looking up at the Cyborg, as was Lole. Mitsuno felt her fingers spider-dance into his hand and grip it tightly. “He’s not…functioning right,” she whispered. “He sounds different from before.”

  Clearly, Demeter didn’t know that the Cyborg’s aural range exceeded the human by at least a hundred percent. Torraway’s ears would pick up her heartbeat, let alone her whispers. Yet he failed to react to what she said. The redly glinting eyes showed no awareness of either of them. He stood like a statue. Maybe, in the past million or so nanoseconds, Torraway had forgotten all about them.

  Lole decided to test him. Keeping a grip on Demeter’s hand, he began to slide sideways, to the right around the Cyborg, and so down the ramp.

  With a flickering motion of hips and knees and elbows that defied the eye, the Colonel repositioned himself to block their escape.

  Still smiling, staying loose, Lole drifted off to the left, dragging Demeter after him.

  Flicker-shift, and the Cyborg was there again, standing across their main line of retreat. He moved like a defensive guard blocking the ball handler in a game of basketball, or like a collie dog heeling a pair of errant sheep, never actually touching Lole and Demeter, but always remaining psychologically poised between them and their goal.

  After two such faked movements, Lole was ready to quit and resume negotiations. But apparently Torraway had other ideas. Suddenly he was herding them—not just guarding against their escape. He kept them in play by pushing his angular body first at Lole, then at Demeter, towering over them, spreading his arms, shaking his wide black wings. Lole took a step backward up the ramp, and Demeter came with him.

  Torraway pressed after them, hedging them more closely still, pushing their gait. Soon Lole was taking two steps at a time, then three and stumbling. In another few seconds, he and Demeter turned and started to run—in the direction Torraway wanted to take them. Mitsuno had no hope of outrunning the Cyborg, which no human could do, but at least he could avoid having that dark presence take…other action with them.

  After a dozen meters they had reached the center of the airlock facility, the six-sided chamber faced with massive doors. All were closed except one, which stood invitingly open, the readout panel beside it flashing clear. Peering through the connecting sleeve, Lole could see the interior of a standard utility walker, much like the one he and Demeter had taken on the survey in Harmonia Mundi.

  “I guess we’re supposed to go on in,” she said with a brave smile.

  “Yes. Please go in,” Torraway grated, coming up behind them.

  Mitsuno led Demeter through the hatch, keeping a sweaty but firm grip on her palm. He drew her to the forward seats, facing the instrument console and the front windshield. Only when they needed both hands to strap themselves in did they break contact.

  Torraway followed behind, ducking his head and wings inside the low interior. He did not sit like a human but crouched, balanced for action, on the deck-plates. Again, he positioned himself in a direct line between them and the airlock.

  The signal he gave must have been electronic, like the commands Wyatt used to control the walker. The rear door sealed with a sigh of pneumatics, the instrument board came alight with pressure readings, gyro headings, battery levels, and motor torques. Outside the side windows, the knee joints of the six legs flexed and bobbed.

  The walker lunged slightly as it started away from the complex, but the movement smoothed as it headed out across the Martian landscape. The floor of the vehicle remained perfectly level, but the ground outside was rising perceptibly.

  Lole, who knew the terrain around Tharsis Montes as well as any surface worker, abruptly realized where this “safe place” might be.

  “No, Colonel! You can’t take us there! We’ll die.”

  His hands darted for the board, hoping to achieve an override and maybe turn this machine around.

  Appearing with the suddenness of a policeman’s cuffs, those black fingers reached around Lole and seized his wrists. They held his hands four centimeters above the controls.

  Demeter turned in her seat and beat against the Cyborg’s arms and face, trying to dislodge him. She might as well have flailed at the rocks outside.

  �
��All right, Demeter,” Lole said. “Don’t hurt yourself…I’ll be good, Colonel.”

  The steel hands held him a moment longer, time enough for Torraway to issue a silent command. The board went black, and the walker marched on.

  Chapter 19

  Back Up the Beanstalk

  Tharsis Montes Space Fountain, June 20

  Seemingly of its own accord—but actually under the grid’s guidance—the walker approached the base of the space fountain. The vehicle strode confidently around to the north wall of the perimeter enclosure, and there it paused. After a moment’s calculation, the machine moved forward slowly. But still it stopped occasionally and pushed its nose at this or that cast panel of sand-blasted concrete. It was seeking something invisible to human or Cyborg eyes in the outer wall, like a dog sniffing a row of identical fenceposts, trying to find the one with exactly the right scent.

  Although he knew the grid was looking for an opening, Roger Torraway was unable to assist in this effort. The Mars nexus ran most of the fountain’s routine functions out of its most distant and least dynamic cyber modules. Their image of the fountain was totally operational, shaped by numbers that represented energy flowing in megawatts and cargo allotments moving in tonnes per meter per second. Of the tower’s layout, its plot plan showing various access points into the base structure, these cybers were ignorant. Any view they might have of the physical plant was internal, diagramed from the traffic carried on inside the feeder systems. They had never seen the foundation from the outside, let alone through the video pickups of a walker that ambled and bobbed over the sand, dodging rocks.

  Even though his head was braced at an odd angle, in preparation for any sudden moves by the captives sitting in front of him, Roger could still see out through the walker’s forward windows. In his peripheral field, he watched a lozenge-shaped passenger pod rise smoothly from the hidden gap between the perimeter wall and the gray side of the fountain itself. In two clicks the pod was above the top edge of the windows and gone from sight, on its way to the upper atmosphere. He would have told the grid that the walker was nearly aligned on one of the tower tracks, maybe even the right one—if he could have told the grid anything.

  The walker ignored the rising pod and kept poking at the wall.

  “What’s happening?” Demeter whispered to Mitsuno. “Is he lost or something?”

  “I don’t know.” The hydrologist sounded worried.

  Roger himself had to keep mute.

  If he could have answered, he might have explained that while most of the cargo riding up and down the fountain went in sealed pods, the builders had provided accommodation for containerized freight and pieces of machinery that were larger and heavier than the standard elevator car. In such cases, the goods were flat-loaded onto a gyro-stabilized platform, anchored against slippage, and sent naked into the vacuum. The grid now wanted to put the walker on such a cargo stage, but first it had to find the entry point into the surface loading bay.

  And it was doing that by the process of trial and error, which grated intolerably on Roger’s human-originated and efficiency-minded sensibilities. If only the grid would release him, let him guide the walker manually—but this was too much trust for the machines to show, even to him.

  Ever since his encounter with Dorrie out at Harmonia Mundi, Roger’s systems had been acting strangely, moving him of their own volition. He was like a marionette being jerked around on its strings. That sensation had horrified him, especially when against his will he had manhandled Lole Mitsuno—whom Roger actually liked as an honest technician, though a human—and then herded him and Demeter Coghlan up the ramp and into the walker. Torraway knew the grid was using him, accessing his muscles and senses through an override on his backpack interface. It was the same override that let Dorrie appear to Roger and guide him when a consensus of the three cybers governing his sensorium observed or analyzed a potential danger. Now the grid had gotten into his systems through that same keyhole. Roger was hopping mad about it but helpless to change anything.

  At last the walker found the fencepost with the right scent. Roger would have laughed, if he could. The access point was a steel door, painted gray like the rest of the concrete wall or the tower’s superstructure, but outlined with bold yellow-and-black stripes. Any human or Cyborg eye would have spotted the warning border from a couple of hundred meters away. But the grid was using the walkers other sensors—its radio receiver, probably—to search for something more subtle and meaningful to a machine intelligence, like the magnetic anomaly of the steel panel or the hum of its servomotors.

  The grid unlocked the tower door from the inside. The bolts made a clang that Torraway could feel distantly through the walker’s deck. The door split and swung outward. As soon as there was clearance for the vehicle’s extended pads, it ambled forward into the darkness.

  “Where are we going?” Demeter asked aloud. “Lole, you know, don’t you?”

  “I think we’re going to find out firsthand what the grid did with that cargo of explosives,” Mitsuno answered.

  “Are we hostages?”

  “Looks like it.”

  The walker advanced through a gray twilight, illuminated partly by the glimmer of dawn that came off the desert outside the still-open doors, partly by the star-shine that filtered down from the gap around the base of the fountain structure. Roger wished he could move, if only to press himself up against the walker’s windshield and look down ahead of those plodding feet. The grid would assume that the cargo platform was now aligned with this level in this bay because it had issued orders to that effect and received no subsequent error messages. That didn’t mean the elevator stage was necessarily in place.

  If the walker was going to step off into empty space, tumbling Roger and his friends sixty meters into the fountain’s maintenance subbasement, he wanted to be the first to know about it. Maybe he could brace Demeter and Lole somehow, keep them from breaking their necks. But of course he was frozen in his crouch, powerless to intercede.

  The timbre of the walker’s footsteps changed. The thud of spring-steel pads on dull concrete became the boom of those same hardpoints against huge metallic plates. They were on the platform.

  Pushing its nose to within a meter of the tower wall, its front end just fitting between the two tracks of the mass driver, the walker used every centimeter of the lift’s available space. Roger could feel it shifting backward and forward, making microadjustments in the placement of its pads for clearance. The grid was cutting its tolerances extremely fine today.

  When the machine was finally in position, it dropped a full three meters. Demeter let out a little squeak of fright. But Torraway knew it was simply moving into a more stable crouch on the platform, much like his own posture. As soon as the fuselage stopped rocking on its suspension, dogs around the perimeter of the deck clamped onto the pads and uprights, anchoring the vehicle in place.

  “Lole…” Demeter began, and Roger could read the dread in her voice. “Is the hull of this thing sealed against vacuum?”

  “Well…” Mitsuno stopped to think. “Nearly so. I mean, Mars’s atmospheric pressure at ground level is about one percent of Earth’s. That’s close enough to vacuum it makes no difference.”

  “Uh-huh.” She didn’t sound convinced. “I guess I have to accept that. You’re breathing this air, too.”

  While she spoke, the side of the tower began to slip down past their window. The wall’s surface was so plain and featureless that after that first blur of motion it virtually disappeared, becoming useless as a measure of their upward speed. The press of added weight from the acceleration soon faded out, too. Roger had to push the readouts from strain gauges built into his knees and legs in order to sense their rate of climb: now meters per second, building smoothly toward kilometers per second.

  As they rose, Torraway felt a strange thing happen: the iron hand that had compelled his movements over the past hour seemed to be releasing him. The connection with the grid was fadi
ng. He wondered what could be causing it. Not the grid itself, because it was accustomed to using him casually, like any daughter cyber which had been subordinated to the program hierarchy. Neither reason nor compassion would inspire the grid to let him go. Thus, something was taking him out from under its control.

  Of course, the interruption would not arise out of sheer distance as the platform moved away from the nexus buried in Tharsis Montes. The grid’s span of control, extended by packet radio repeaters, extended over the breadth of Mars and, with fiberoptic junctions, up the full height of the fountain to oversee all its operations. The nexus administered the satellites in their separate orbits as well.

  Then Roger remembered that the fountain was supported by the inertia of thousands, or perhaps millions, of ferrite hoops that were shot aloft at great speed. Their passage would create a powerful magnetic field. And so would the mass drivers that pulled and pushed the cargo pods and this platform along the exterior rails. The conflicting fields would block radio signals into Torraway’s backpack computer.

  Roger flexed and extended his fingers, twisted his wrists, tensed the arches of his feet, unbent his knees, and stood slowly against the microaccelerations of the walker’s cabin. He moved slowly, because even steel muscles can cramp from unexpected exertion.

  “Lole, look!” Demeter husked. “What’s he going to do to us?”

  Torraway experimented with his voice circuits, to make sure they were his own again.

  “Nothing,” he said at last. “Demeter, I’m terribly sorry about all this. I had to break our deal.”

  Electromagnetic Safe Zone, June 20

  Ellen Sorbel hovered in the background, watching and waiting to assist, as Dr. Lee cut into Jeff Te Jing’s throat.

  The doctor was trying to open a passage by which the young man could breathe; otherwise he would drown in the blood seeping from his crushed larynx. With the selection of instruments and drugs at hand, chosen and measured out for the one operation on Jory’s systems, Wa Lixin had explained that he was working without painkillers and with barely enough disinfectant to clean his incision point. For the probable concussion and bruising of Te Jing’s pericardium, the doctor could only rely on the patient’s youth and natural strength.